Fire Inside
by Sunlight through Leaves
Summary: Kakashi's choices were usually somewhere between a rock and a hard place. This time is no different: lose his magic entirely or send it to the only available option. It wasn't actually all that difficult a decision, but the ramifications of foisting his magic off on Iruka might be more costly than he'd originally thought. AU: Modern with magic.
1. Chapter 1

**Fire Inside**  
_**Rating:**__ Teen And Up Audiences_**_  
_**_Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic_  
_**Summary:**__ Kakashi's choices were usually somewhere between a rock and a hard place. This time is no different: lose his magic entirely or send it to the only available option. It wasn't actually all that difficult a decision, but the ramifications of foisting his magic off on Iruka might be more costly than he'd originally thought._  
_**Prompt/Scenario:**__ #41 by megyal: For some reason, Iruka gets the Sharingan for a short while._  
_**Notes:**__ This was such a delightful prompt to fill that I got quite carried away. Special thanks to Kiterie for catching all my bouts of stupidity._

* * *

A knock after midnight rarely heralded good news.

This was most spectacularly showcased by the time ANBU had shown up at Iruka's door to inform him that his apprentice, at the ripe age of nine, had managed to burn down an entire city block. Thankfully, the area had been condemned and deserted, and there had been no casualties; otherwise, ANBU, a delightful mix of magical law enforcement and special ops, would have been forced to execute Naruto on the spot. As it was, they had rather forcefully suggested that Iruka find a way to reign in Naruto's considerable power until Naruto had the ability and discipline to control it himself.

Given that experience it was understandable that, when he heard the solid thunk against his door, he buried his head deeper into his arm and tried desperately to ignore it. The second knock seemed more anemic than the first, trailing off as if the knocker's hand had slipped down the door at the end. Bad news.

Iruka raised his head to look blearily at the door and scrubbed his hand over his face to dislodge the post-it notes stuck there. His neck and back ached – he was getting far too old to fall asleep on a pile of research materials including books, notes, and pencils, particularly when he'd been sitting on the floor and had slumped over his coffee table.

"'Tis some visitor," he muttered. "Tapping at my chamber door." He shoved himself to his feet and stepped carefully over the precariously balanced pile of books that had collected in the narrow space between couch and coffee table. "An inconsiderate visitor, that is, who's never learned how to use a watch." His grumbling was probably uncharitable, but it helped keep the nagging fear at bay.

The minute he pulled the door open, the sharp copper tang of blood hit the air. Definitely bad news. He peered into the darkness beyond his door and fumbled for the switch to turn on the exterior light.

The dark shape crowding his doorway flinched ever so slightly when the light came on but recovered and said, "Hey."

"Kakashi?" Iruka backed out of the way, allowing Kakashi room to get inside. The metallic bite in the air grew stronger when he passed. "Your blood or someone else's?"

"A little bit of both, but mostly mine." Kakashi staggered through the living room and towards the kitchen. "Could use some healing."

All thoughts of sleep, the late hour, and the still-uncompleted research sitting on his table vanished. "Of course," Iruka slipped past him and into the kitchen, gently tapping Kakashi's shoulder in passing. "Come on."

It took several moments for the water in his sink to run hot – one of the disadvantages of having a water heater that already had rust on it by the time World War II rolled around. He squirted soap into one hand and splashed the other under the water to test the temperature, Iruka said over his shoulder, "You do realize this is not my forte." When the water was finally more than lukewarm, he scrubbed his hands up to his elbows, "You should have gone to Tsunade or Sakura."

"Couldn't make it."

Iruka paused in the process of shaking his hands off over the sink and turned to take in Kakashi leaning heavily against the doorframe leading into the kitchen. Not for the first time, he wished Kakashi didn't make a habit of wearing a soft black mask over the bottom half of his face. It made it almost impossible to read his expression. "It's that bad?"

"Worse," Kakashi grunted.

He slapped his hands across the nearest dishtowel in a vain hope that it would leave them reasonably dry. The books and papers gathered on his table weren't crucial - he had no qualms about just sweeping them to the floor - but he'd rather not get them soaking wet. A second pass of his arm cleared the table of any remaining detritus and exposed the protective circle burned into the surface of the table. "They've patched you up enough over the years that you should be a sight better at this than I am." Iruka tapped his orbital bone just to the left of his eye, indicating the complex tattoo that encircled Kakashi's eye.

"Couldn't concentrate enough." Kakashi had shambled across the room on his own steam but didn't offer any complaint when Iruka slipped an arm under his armpit and around the small of his back and helped him up onto the table. "Abdomen," he muttered, sounding for all the world like uttering that single word had taken an effort on par with moving a mountain.

Iruka's eyebrows shot up, and he carefully helped Kakashi lift his legs up onto the flat of the table. After a moment's hesitation, he settled his hands across the spines of Kakashi's hips - they were more pronounced than usual. Honestly, Iruka'd asked Kakashi's oversized pack of familiars to make sure he was eating enough. He'd have to have words with them later. Now, however, Kakashi was probably bleeding into his stomach or intestines or both, and the only silver lining to the injury cloud was that he hadn't been eviscerated. Iruka pulled gently on Kakashi's hips, shuffling him around until he was more-or-less centered in the protective circle.

The worn gray t-shirt emblazoned with a spiky logo and the words 'Lucky Seven,' all crudely rendered in Sharpie, had seen better days. From mid-torso down, it was a uniformly dark red color. Blood and a lot of it. When it came to injuries, Kakashi never did anything halfway.

After placing a reassuring hand on his chest, Iruka sprinted for the bathroom at the back of his apartment. One of the joys of magic was that you simply didn't need some of the more mundane things, but if he was going to tackle that much blood, Iruka was going wear gloves. Dried blood was a beast to get out from under your fingernails, and since he was going to spend the next several minutes convincing Kakashi's blood that it really should stay all together and inside his body, he didn't really fancy the inevitable weak tugging from those small bits trying to get back to their master.

"I hope you're not allergic." Iruka snapped the latex gloves around his wrists and brandished a pair of medical shears. The injury was so fresh that it might have happened on Iruka's doorstep which meant that, mercifully, Kakashi's shirt wasn't dried into his wound. He set the shears aside with a sigh of relief - Kakashi may never have admitted it, but it was one of his favorite shirts - and peeled the fabric back.

To the layman, all magic was strange, but once said layman learned what to expect, magic became no more mystical than changing a tire or unclogging a toilet. It had materials, tools, and steps that, if followed with the right application of power, would get the desired result 99% of the time. But even in that framework, healing magic was still downright bizarre. All wounds were different, so why develop a spell to heal this particular gash when it wouldn't work on the next one? No, with healing magic you simply applied your own power and tried to right the discontinuities piece by piece.

In layman's terms, you pictured the muscle or artery or skin whole again, zapped it, and hoped. It required a fairly good working knowledge of anatomy, an excellent imagination, and a thorough catalog of the injuries. No point in putting the skin back together if your patient continued to bleed out on the inside. All that did was make the scene less messy.

Iruka grabbed a flashlight from the kit, muttered under his breath to sterilize it, and aimed it at the puncture in Kakashi's abdomen. The wound was fairly small but was bleeding profusely, all of which made it hard to see what the actual damage was. A splash of water cleared off the worst of the wound, but it continued to bleed sluggishly and would continue to obstruct his view if he didn't do something. He traced a haphazard circle around the wound. The circle effectively put a clear shield over the wound to keep Kakashi's blood inside the body. Any blood that made its way to the shield would be gently encouraged to return from whence it came. He spread his hand over the wound, slipping a little bit of his own magic into the gash and prodding around for something that simply felt wrong. Magic abhorred breaks in someone's innate nature.

There. A shudder ran up his arm as his probe brushed past the edge of Kakashi's stomach. The wound was small, a nick at most, but was enough. Kakashi must have been suppressing both the pain and the bleeding just to make it here. Between the blood loss and the power drain, it was amazing he was still conscious. Iruka hissed in a breath and continued to poke around for any other wounds besides the muscles and skin, murmuring apologies and reassurances to Kakashi as he went.

Kakashi hid the flinches well but not well enough. Having someone investigate your insides with magic was not a pleasant experience.

Iruka breathed a sigh of relief; besides the stomach, no other major organs were hit, and he was reasonably sure he could patch that up. He sat back on his heels and closed his eyes to better clear and focus his mind. Expert healers simply pictured the marred skin whole again. When faced with the glaring reality of an injury literally inches from his nose, Iruka had problems simply erasing that image from his mind. Instead, he pictured stretching his magic to a fine thread and using it to suture the wounds closed. Over the next hour, he slowly pieced Kakashi back together.

Magic was not easy. Iruka sagged against the edge of the table. He'd burned out the majority of his power with that healing stunt. He knew Kakashi would be out for a few hours, and Iruka was not falling asleep at his kitchen table again. The short distance from kitchen to couch seemed like a marathon, but he made it and collapsed face first onto the worn fabric.

He woke to the sound of his coffee table being dragged away from the couch and creaking under someone's weight. He pried an eye open and stared at Kakashi's knee for a few seconds before he found the energy to tilt his head up enough to focus on Kakashi's face.

Kakashi ran a hand over his stomach, brows drawn down. "This feels really bizarre."

One of the problems with stitching someone together with magic was that you had to leave some of your magic behind. Iruka could only imagine how strange that would feel, but, in his defense, Kakashi had come to him. "Bite me. I told you it wasn't my forte. If you wanted medical expertise, you should have gone to someone else."

Kakashi inclined his head slightly, clearly conceding the point.

With a groan, Iruka dropped his head back down onto the couch and closed his eyes. Keeping them open was too much effort. "I did manage to save the shirt," he pointed out.

"Yes, thank you for that." There was a smile behind the words.

"I'm going to get some sleep," Iruka mumbled into the lumpy cushions. "You should get some too."

"The couch is awfully small for both of us." The words practically dripped with tongue-in-cheek innuendo. Ever since he'd discovered just how much he could make Iruka blush with a couple of well-placed insinuations, Kakashi had delighted in taking advantage of it. The game had escalated over the years as Iruka's reactions diminished, but it was a comfortable constant of their friendship.

Iruka summoned the energy to smack Kakashi's knee, although his hand just sort of landed on it and slid off. "Take the bed. There's no way I can move." He buried his face deeper into the cushion as he listened to Kakashi stand and shuffle towards the bedroom. Hard as it was to believe that Kakashi was sleeping in his bed while Iruka lounged on the couch, it was harder still to remember that five short years ago, Hatake Kakashi had been nothing more to him than a name dropped whenever an expert mage was needed.

After the SNAFU with Naruto, the ANBU, and the flambéed buildings, Iruka'd agonized for days until he reached the decision that Naruto needed a mage who was used to dealing with significantly more power. Luckily, mages were a dime a dozen in Konoha. Something about the city attracted them to the point that an entire sub-government had evolved to keep the mayhem under control, and Iruka'd found himself in said government leader's office asking her for advice.

Tsunade's eyes had flashed wickedly, and she'd tapped her fingers on the highly polished desk in front of her. "Actually," she'd said. "I think I may have a solution, and this is perfect timing."

As it turned out, two other apprentices had been dropped off that morning by equally desperate masters, although all of them were desperate for different reasons. Iruka still wasn't sure if Tsunade was trying to fix Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke or Kakashi or all of the above. Knowing her, it was probably the later, and it worked. Kakashi'd had six apprentices before the dynamic trio had been foisted off on him. None of the previous six had lasted more than a week. At the beginning, Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura had called themselves the 'Lucky Seven' as part joke and part wishful thinking, but the moniker had stuck, as had their presence in Kakashi's life.

Since Tsunade's gamble had paid off, it was the last Iruka had expected to hear of it, and so he had been surprised when he'd opened his front door and almost run head first into Kakashi. He'd known the name, of course – most anyone in their line of work did – and he'd seen Kakashi loitering in the back of many of Naruto's photographs, but he'd never expected any face-to-face contact.

His heart had plummeted when he'd opened the door, and he'd been about to ask exasperatedly what Naruto had done this time when he'd noticed that Kakashi was glowing. Not physically, but to anyone with even the slightest smidgen of magical ability, he had been lit up light a break-and-shake glow stick. And was just about the same shade of neon green.

"Purging Naruto's magic from me didn't do any good," Kakashi had said without any preamble.

Iruka'd choked down a truly unsympathetic laugh. "That's because it's not his magic; it's yours. That's the brilliance of this spell," he continued. "It causes the target's magic to fluoresce. Makes it much harder to get rid of." The sight of Kakashi scowling down at his hands had elicited a snort that he hadn't quite been able to cover. "Not much good for tracking anyone over a long distance, but it works great in crowds." He'd found out much later that Kakashi'd been teaching his apprentices to guard against attacks and believed there was no better teacher than experience. Sick of not knowing where the attacks were coming from, Naruto had used one of Iruka's tracking spells to level the playing field.

"You developed this to use on Naruto didn't you?"

After a long pause during which he had considered denying it, Iruka'd said, "Possibly." He'd peered at Kakashi. "Do you want me to teach you?"

"I already have this one." Kakashi'd tapped the intricate tattoo that circled his left eye. "But I wouldn't mind learning some others that he might use against me."

Iruka'd caught himself leaning in for a closer look at Kakashi's eye and sat back on his heels before he looked truly rude. He couldn't help but be fascinated – rumors about the Sharingan went hand in hand with Kakashi's name – especially because, besides the tattoos, the vertical scar, and the golden-brown iris that didn't match the right eye, it didn't look particularly magical. "Forewarned is forearmed, after all."

There'd been the slightest hint of a smile around the edges of his eyes while Kakashi'd said, "Indeed."

* * *

The Sharingan is a spectacular thing. At its most basic, it allows you to see a few heartbeats into the future and predict someone's moves, no doubt an advantageous skill for a mage who made his living fighting. To the casual observer, it would seem impossible to surprise anyone who possessed the Sharingan. Bad news for those trying to plan birthday parties, but good news for the possessor if it meant that they didn't get killed.

The problem is that the thing has to be turned on for it to work, and, unfortunately, it uses enough power to dissuade even the strongest of mages from leaving it on indefinitely. The tattoos around Kakashi's eye served as the off switch – a breath of power through the patterns and characters, and the Sharingan could be activated. The activation itself was almost instantaneous, but again, you'd have to know that you're in imminent danger and activate it before something bad happens.

No one expected imminent danger on the streets of Konoha. Sure, the plethora of mages made for exciting moments with accidental spell interactions, but by and large, the mages there were friendly types just looking to make a living.

Kakashi rarely had his Sharingan activated in Konoha unless he was training. Had he been training, he might have been able to avoid the solid chunk of wood that struck the back of his head, but as it was, lights flashed across his vision, and he sunk to the ground, fighting for consciousness. It was a losing battle.

Clawing his way back up through the darkness and the grogginess was a harder task than he'd expected. This was not the first time he'd been struck upside the head, so he was no stranger to the feeling of a concussion, but this was somehow worse. He peeled his eyes open and found symbols scratched into the ground scarce inches from his nose.

The air fairly reeked of magic, and he could hear low voices behind him, but he couldn't see what was going on. He reached for his own magic only to find it slipping through his fingers like water – the harder he grabbed, the harder it was to hold. He dropped his chin back to the floor. Suppression spells, the most sophisticated kind, didn't place the user's magic beyond their reach, but simply made it impossible to use. It was maddeningly frustrating and significantly more effective. Walls between a user and their magic could be broken down, but suppressing the ability to use magic was harder to overcome.

He tried to sit up, but was only able to raise his head a few, insignificant inches. As he moved, an enormous weight settled casually across his shoulders, knocking the air out of his lungs. He lay flat and still until the weight lifted and then drew in a deep breath before peering at the symbols inscribed in a circle around him. Now that the ringing between his ears had finally ceased and he found himself more in control of his faculties, he recognized the suppression spell interlocked with another set of symbols that created the circle. They were binding both his magic and physical strength – people tended to only protect against one or the other, which left a opportunity for exploitation and, in his case, escape. Taking control of the situation would not be as easy as he'd hoped.

"He's awake." A soft voice pointed out from over his shoulder, a small amount of concern coloring the words.

"He's not going anywhere." A woman's voice responded confidently from farther away.

Kakashi pressed his cheek into the dirt and wriggled his shoulders, testing how far he could lift them before the unbearable weight dropped onto him. If he could shift himself a foot or so, he might be able to break the circle. It wasn't the most elegant way to cancel another person's spell, and it was likely to backfire on him in decidedly unsavory ways, but he wasn't going to give them the opportunity to finish their spell.

"He's stronger than the others." The first person sounded young, possibly sick, but definitively male. The concern hadn't faded from his voice.

"I know. It's great luck, isn't it?" She was moving around the room, and the intermittent sound of chalk scratching on the hard floor reached Kakashi's ears. "And it gets us so much closer to what we need by the new moon."

Luck may have been on their side, but it was not on his. The spell only allowed him a handful of millimeters of motion in any given direction – not enough that he'd be able to get to the edge of the circle and break it.

"But, we said we wouldn't."

"We're not going to have this argument. We need this."

"But."

"No."

There was silence for a moment, and then the boy seemed to notice Kakashi's faint attempts at struggling. "He's moving. Are you sure you can hold him?" He seemed less than reassured by the snort of conviction from his companion. "It takes time to pull their magic out, and if he gets free..."

"I know who he is. Like I said, I've got him under control." the woman cut him off, her tone brooking no room for any more argument. "I'm almost ready."

Kakashi let his cheek settle back to the ground and took a few deep breaths of musty air to clear his mind and focus his thoughts. Sure, he'd been moving, but the woman was right – she had him expertly corralled. The off-handed comment about pulling his magic out set his teeth on edge. There were rumors of spells that could do that, and the results, once the caster had gotten his hands on a sufficient amount of magic, shared a space on the universal scale of bad things with world wars and plagues.

Stopping it was the only logical course of action, but with the clock ticking and his hands metaphorically tied behind his back, Kakashi wasn't awash in options. The sheer number of spells copied and stored in his mind by the Sharingan offered him limitless possibilities, none of which were helpful given his current lack of magic. He closed his eyes and searched deeper, looking for anything related to his situation, anything that might help. He had used suppression spells before; perhaps someone had countered him in a way he could use.

Tucked away and gathering dust bunnies in one of the deepest, darkest corners of his mind, Kakashi found a dark memory from ANBU that he'd tried his hardest to forget. Deaths of both his comrades and the target ANBU had been sent to subdue hung heavy on the memory. Kakashi'd had the mage trapped and impotent using a suppression spell that no one had ever been able to escape from.

Everyone had been safe right up until the point that they weren't.

Kakashi had turned right before the man had struck – soon enough to copy what he'd done with the Sharingan but not soon enough to stop him. He'd killed the mage, but not before three of his comrades had already fallen. It was a testament to how badly he'd wanted to forget his failure to protect his comrades, the mantra his father had preached, that he hadn't thought of it immediately.

The technique the mage had used had not been a way to break the suppression spell but rather a way to get around it. Kakashi closed his eyes and, instead of grabbing for his magic like a drowning man grabs at any modicum of safety, he pictured cupping his hands and letting the magic pool there. It allowed him to gather some of his magic at the cost of having any finesse when he went to use it. In the water analogy, it was like bringing a soup pot to a water gun fight. You could get someone fairly well soaked with the soup pot, but you couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be collateral damage to nearby targets.

Unfortunately, even with the magic that he'd been able to collect, any options that would help him escape required more control than he could manage. His only chance was to throw raw power at something and hope.

The miasma of magic grew suddenly more oppressive, the frequency of the vibration in the floor climbing until it was beyond of the level of hearing. He had moments only before the spell was completed, and he had no options to stop the spell outright. However, the control he lacked was built into the spell his captors were attempting – the symbols etched in the stone around him and the candles burning in a fiery circle that surrounded them all. They were going to take his magic, and if he couldn't stop it, he'd at least try to change where his magic was going to go.

Directing a spell required almost as much finesse as starting one from scratch, but Kakashi had an ace up his sleeve. Or up his stomach, if he was going to be specific with the phrase. When they'd thrown him to the floor, he'd landed on his arm and, without even moving, could feel the threads of magic Iruka'd used to piece him together.

Behind him, the woman let out a shout, and the candles around them blazed. Now or never.

Kakashi tossed his magic into the churning power that surrounded him, the threads of Iruka's magic tangled within it, and he forcefully encouraged his magic to go where he wanted. The spell railed against his efforts – the boy was coded in the incantations and inscriptions as a destination – but he was stronger than the mage, stronger than the spell, and even without an ounce of control, his sheer power was enough to overwhelm it.

Imagine ripping your circulatory system out through your skin without bothering to make any helpful incisions first. Having his magic torn out of him felt quite a bit like that. Kakashi lay there, blind with pain and panting, and could only hope that the receiving end of that spell was much more pleasant.


	2. Chapter 2

Muttering suffused the background of Iruka's dream. It consisted of the same phrases over and over – the voices were nudging him to wake up and open his eyes – but it was barely intelligible because they were continuously talking over each other. He groaned. He'd had weird dreams before, but this was in a category of it's own.

If his subconscious wanted him to wake up that badly, however, who was he to argue? He peeled open an eye just far enough to see the clock on his bedside table: one in the morning. Another groan escaped his lips; this one motivated by both the early hour and the way his vision swam when he opened his eyes. Everything seemed to have a duplicate that, in some cases, was not as stationary as the original. His throat was parched, his head pounding, all fairly indicative signs that he was well on his way to being sick as a dog.

"Open your eyes," one of the voices insisted.

Had he been able to scrape together enough of his faculties to make a response, he would have pointed out that he had, and it made him feel immensely worse. He was planning on keeping his eyes closed for the time being.

Another chorus of instructions greeted that thought, and Iruka buried his face in the pillow and immediately regretted the motion. The cloth was soaked with sweat as were, now that he was thinking about it, the sheets tangled around his torso and legs.

"Wake up!"

It felt like something slapped his brain. It wasn't the first time – that particular technique was a favorite prank amongst young kids, as it tended to make people sit up and blurt out whatever they'd just been thinking about – but it ceased to work once you'd reached mid-teens and your natural mental defenses were strong enough to keep most people out. Which meant someone had gotten in. Iruka sat bolt upright.

The room tilted to the side and slowly shimmied its way back to a more proper orientation. Iruka retched, trying to keep down the small amount of food he'd had for dinner, and squeezed his eyes shut.

"No, you have to keep them open!" Something solid shoved at his elbow, jostling him.

Against his better judgment, Iruka opened his eyes and looked down. There was a dog in his bed. Not only that, but there was a shadow of a dog that sat back on its haunches and peered up at him right before the original did. Iruka's stomach protested again.

At least it wasn't a completely unfamiliar dog. "Uhei, right?" Iruka hedged. He'd met Kakashi's familiars on a few occasions. He knew the names, but still had trouble attaching them confidently to each dog.

The sleek rust and white dog nodded. "You have to keep your eyes open."

"I'm going to throw up on you if I do that." Iruka shoved his hair out of his face. His hair was almost as drenched in sweat as the sheets, and his skin felt like it was on fire.

"Then you should move to the bathroom," a second voice pointed out, the words echoing strangely. He hadn't noticed it before, but given the soup his mind seemed to have become, it was entirely possible that he'd just missed it. "Because you don't have a choice and this is the only thing that's going to make you feel better."

Iruka looked up from scrubbing his hand over his face. The springs of his bed groaned under the combined weight of Kakashi's familiars, because all eight had found space – behind his knees, over his ankles, and in the space he'd vacated when he sat up – to crowd onto the bed with him. "What the hell...?" Even through the haze, their presence in his apartment set off alarm bells. "Kakashi!"

"Not something we can worry about now," the pug that was draped over his thigh – Pakkun, he was fairly certain – said with the strange, echoing quality. His tone suggested he'd been worrying about it for quite some time now. "You're in trouble." The shadow of Pakkun leapt from the bed and all the dogs seemed to stir and start moving before they actually started moving.

Several years before, Kakashi and Iruka had gotten spectacularly drunk to celebrate the fact that they, and Kakashi's team, had survived the evaluation that allowed Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke to be practicing mages instead of just apprentices. Though neither of them had admitted it out loud, they'd both worried that Naruto was going to level half the city in his determination to pass the first time, and coming out with only one building with structural damage had been a winning situation.

In the false confidence brought on by alcohol, Iruka'd screwed up the courage to ask Kakashi what the Sharingan was like. Not what it did – most people knew that – but what it was like on a daily basis. In light of current developments, it was probably a very good thing he'd asked.

"Shit," Iruka swore loudly and clapped a hand over his left eye.

"No." A head the size of a wrecking ball slammed itself against the small of his back, almost throwing him from the bed.

Iruka swiveled to glare at Bull – there was no mistaking the enormous dog or forgetting his name. "Why not?"

"Can't you feel it?"

At that moment, he felt like death warmed over. His skin was tight and prickling, and his hands itched the way they did when he'd gone far too long without using magic. It was a renewable resource, and it tended to keep building up if you didn't use it. But he'd practically drained himself two days ago by healing Kakashi, and he'd been using minor spells here and there in the intervening time. He shoved aside the fog from what must have been a raging fever and reached for his magic. He was expecting a sprinkler, and what he got was a fire hose.

He snatched his mind away from it before he channeled it into any spell. Between the fever and the sheer enormity of his magic, Iruka wasn't sure he had the focus to keep even a simple spell from getting out of control. Even at his peak, with his magic fully restored, he had less than half the power available to him now.

No wonder he felt like he was burning from the inside out; he was. He drew in a deep breath and forced his left eye, which he had reflexively closed when he'd dropped his hand, open. He knew Kakashi well enough to know that the Sharingan burned magic and lots of it.

Shiba, a gray dog with a shock of dark fur on the top of his head that formed a short mohawk, started to sit up, but paused when Iruka groaned.

"Please don't move. Just give me a minute for everything to get better and then you can move." Even with that request, Iruka stared fixedly at a corner of the ceiling, trying to keep the dogs out of his line of sight so that they didn't have to freeze completely. He felt a couple of heads settle down on his thigh and heard the rhythmic thumping of a wagging tail. "Where's Kakashi?"

"We don't know." Uhei's admittance was met with a chorus of whines from the other dogs. "Something happened last night. I can't really describe it, but it was kind of like the world shifted – like we'd had an earthquake – and when the dust settled, we couldn't feel Kakashi anymore. We could feel you, and you were..."

"Dying." Iruka finished for her. The sheer amount of magic he'd had stuffed into his mind would have burnt out synapses if he hadn't found a way to start bleeding it off. It would have become harder to think, then harder to breathe, and eventually harder to live. "We need to find him."

As dramatic statements go, that one leaned heavily towards the obvious end of the spectrum, but Iruka wasn't thinking about a massive man-hunt across the city where they hoped to get lucky. Under the roster of Konoha mages, he was listed with the specialty of 'TNT,' a much-lambasted abbreviation for 'track and trap.' He didn't usually have hordes of magic to go gallivanting about with, but he was damn good at finding people and keeping them there until the more battle-inclined mages arrived.

"I'll get the spells ready." He swung his legs over the side of the bed and promptly crumpled almost all the way to the floor. He hung a few inches above it, the back of his t-shirt caught in Bull's enormous jaws. "Thanks," he offered as Bull slowly eased him the rest of the way down.

That put a damper in a prospective rescue plan. The worry about Kakashi had driven all thoughts of his own infirmity out of his mind. The Sharingan was certainly doing its part to boil off the excess magic, but Iruka was still weak and shaky and, when he put a hand to his forehead, his skin would have given lava a run for its money. He couldn't stand, as evidenced by his graceless descent to the floor, and he certainly couldn't concentrate well enough to pull off even the simplest tracking spell. He had to get his temperature down before his brain boiled. If he could, he'd clear some of the fog out of his mind.

"What now?" One of the dogs asked from the bed.

Iruka grunted, "Bathroom," and was immensely grateful when Bull landed on the floor next to him with a solid thunk and nudged his head under Iruka's arm. He wound up putting the majority of his weight on Bull despite his best efforts, but he still made it across the expanse of bedroom, down the hall, and into his tiny cupboard of a bathroom.

Bull had to leave him at the door – there simply wasn't enough room and Iruka didn't really fancy having the dogs watch him shower. Luckily, the sink was within arm's reach, and Iruka steadied himself on that and the toilet as he pushed the door shut and reached for the shower. His water ran hot on the best of circumstances. He fiddled with the knobs until he had something more in the vicinity of lukewarm. Even that felt icy to his fingers and arms, but he stripped and ducked under it anyway, biting back a curse.

His body protested, wracked with shivers from the moment he stepped under the spray, but his mind cleared a little bit. The magic was still there, burning away at the underside of his skin, but he might be able to manage some simple spells. It wouldn't use a great deal of magic, but it would help. The first one that came to mind was one he used routinely. It was a good candidate; he could practically do it in his sleep.

He hadn't ever bothered to invest in an air conditioner. He opened windows when he needed to and, when he was particularly desperate, he'd cast a simple spell that tweaked the temperature in the room. He leaned against the shower wall, closed his eyes, and formed the hand signs that would anchor the spell. He reached for his magic and focused on taking the temperature of the bathroom down a degree or two.

His next breath frosted the air around him. The droplets on his skin froze instantly, creating a fine patina of ice. The thin film of water at the bottom of the shower turned to ice under his feet, and the little strength in his legs fled along with the heat. He slid down the wall of the shower to huddle at the bottom, knowing full well he'd die if he stayed there – hypothermia would get him just as surely as the magic had been trying to burn him from the inside out. On the plus side, it seemed like he'd drained his batteries by overdoing that spell. At least he wouldn't be cooked from within and frozen from without.

The spray of the shower had flash-frozen into an icy waterfall that hung precariously above him. The hot water still flowing from the showerhead formed runnels in the outside of the ice. If he could afford to wait long enough, that danger would be taken care of. Waiting, however, was likely to be detrimental to his health. Iruka closed his eyes and considered his options. He didn't have enough magic left to heat the room back up. Kakashi's familiars were right outside the door, but the cold made his voice hoarse and broken, and no matter how hard he tried, they didn't seem to be able to hear him. He was fighting a battle to keep his eyes open and to keep himself awake. He was losing.

Outside the bathroom, a chorus of barking rang out. Amidst the ruckus, one word, repeated multiple times, was clear enough to understand: "Boss!"

Iruka heard the door open and heard soft footsteps on the frost covered floor. He struggled to crack his eyes open, but couldn't focus well enough on the person bending over him. Still, there was only one person that the dogs called 'Boss.' "Kakashi?" One arm snuck under his knees, another around his back. He protested weakly as he was lifted.

Kakashi's grip tightened on him, as if he was afraid that Iruka would struggle. "Relax. I've got you."

"I'm naked," Iruka pointed out sleepily. The other protests hadn't worked, but maybe this would.

"I'm doing my level best not to notice."

Iruka wasn't sure how you didn't notice the state of someone's dress when you were carrying them, but he figured it at least allowed him to preserve some modesty. He changed the subject. "You okay?"

"I've been better." Kakashi turned sideways to fit them through the door. "But I'm still doing better than you are."

Considering that he'd feared the worst, just having Kakashi alive was a win in Iruka's book. "That's a relief. What happened?"

Kakashi dropped him onto the bed, clearly not trusting Iruka's limbs to support him even for a moment. "Sleep. I'll explain it in the morning."

Although the blankets and pillows beckoned him, a thought occurred to Iruka right before he attempted to muster up the strength to bury himself in their warmth. "The ice..." A towel landed across his ankles, and the little ice pellets popped off under Kakashi's ministrations. When it reached his torso, he tried halfheartedly to bat Kakashi's hands away, but he was feeling warmer and slightly more human, so he couldn't muster up the energy to put up a real fight.

When he was done, Kakashi sank onto the side of the bed and waited while Iruka burrowed under the blankets. "I'm glad you're alright."

"Ditto." Iruka murmured into the pillow. "No idea how I would've explained the dogs to my landlord." He heard Kakashi chuckle, rise, and pad out into the living room. The unmistakable clatter of dog feet on wood floors followed him out.

* * *

He was in a basement. He'd been here before – the dank, the moss, the patterns of cracks in the wall were all familiar, burned into his memory as if he'd spent hours studying them. He knew this place, and the recognition of it induced a sharp twinge of fear.

He was standing under a swinging, bare light bulb. As it swung forward, he caught sight of the shape of a young girl slumped in a chair against the far wall. He also saw the chaotic symbols etched in blood on the floor around her. The whole scene turned his stomach, but without even looking closely, he was certain that she was alive. Ransoming someone didn't work well if they died.

He edged closer to the circle, studying it. Some of the inscriptions looked familiar, but he couldn't quite put his finger on where he remembered them from. The four characters directly in front of her glowed an eerie red in the semi-darkness. One of the characters suddenly flickered and went out.

"What's it doing?" Obito said from behind him.

He turned, counting silently, and glanced back at him. He knew Obito had followed him in and he'd been hoping that Obito would keep an eye on the entrance, but Obito was staring fixedly at Rin and the glowing symbols. Another one fell dark. "It's a countdown," he heard himself say. Thirty seconds or so had passed between the two, so they had less than a minute.

Obito stuttered a couple of steps forward, red eyes focused intently on the circle. "Can we break it?"

"Not without hurting her." Another light flickered out of existence.

"Can you stop the countdown?

"No."

"So what do we do then?" Obito shouted at him.

But before he could answer, the final light dimmed and vanished. A voice that surrounded them, buffeting them with its force, intoned, "Time's up." For a brief moment, everything grew impossibly still.

Then a wave of wind blasted out from the circle, rocking both of them on their feet and crashing into the walls and ceiling of the basement with enough force to stop a charging rhino. The rotted beams trembled and cracked, the floor joists giving way under the weight of equipment and boxes stored on the floor above. With a shattering groan, the ceiling collapsed.

He dove to the side, rolled, and launched himself towards Rin – freed from her circle, but still unconscious. Something heavy smacked his shoulder as he went, but he ignored it. It was harder to ignore the beam above him breaking free from its supports. He threw up an arm to shield himself, but he didn't stand a chance against that kind of momentum. Pain creased the side of his face, and blood obscured his vision. He tried to shake it off, but his body refused to cooperate, and he dropped to on knee, ears ringing.

He could hear Obito shouting somewhere in the dust and debris. The ceiling was coming down, and he couldn't move himself let alone get to Rin. He willed strength into his legs, but his knees remained firmly rooted to the floor.

"Move!" That word was clear. Obito emerged out of the gloom, half-dragging, half-carrying Rin. One of his ankles was mangled, and he was barely making any progress.

He managed to get his legs under him in time to catch them both as Obito stumbled. He bent to sling Rin over his shoulders and made to grab Obito by the back of his collar to help him along.

Obito shook off the assistance. "Move!" He yelled again.

"The ceiling's coming down."

"Get her out!"

He'd have to trust Obito to manage. He spun, took two steps towards the stairs leading back to the ground floor, and was knocked flat by the blast wave caused by all of the debris from the ceiling making a quick descent to the floor.

Rin was shouting, but the words were incoherent through the ringing in his ears. She shoved hard on his shoulder until he rolled into a sitting position facing back into the basement.

"Obito," he breathed the name out, fear and pain roiling into a heavy lump in his stomach.

Blood trickled out of the corner of Obito's mouth with every labored breath. He lay pinned from the shoulders down under two massive beams and several tons of concrete and dirt from where the wall had collapsed. His right hand and head were still free, barely.

"Shit." He stumbled to his feet and tugged at the debris with no success. He turned to Rin, "Help me!"

But she knew. She was a healer by specialty, and she knew when a battle was lost. After gulping down a sob, she shook her head.

He ignored her and resumed tugging at the beams. "We'll get you out of there," he insisted, choosing to not notice the faint shakes of Obito's head. When Obito pointed at his eye and then jabbed a finger at him, he stumbled back. "No. That'll kill you!"

"Dead anyway," Obito pointed out.

Rin was crying, but she was also gathering her magic in her hands, reaching one hand towards Obito and one hand towards him.

"What are you doing?" He shouted.

She shook her head to clear the tears from her eyes. "We have to. It's his final wish."

"There's not going to be anything final about it. We're going to get him out, and we're going to get him better," he glared at both of them. "I'm not leaving either of you behind."

"Not gonna have a choice," Obito gasped. "Take it, please. You could do so much with it."

Even as he was working up another argument, Rin's magic hit him hard. The whole room spun, and he lost his balance, sagging to the ground and dropping his hands to the pavement to catch himself right before his chin hit. He just barely summoned the strength to turn his head to look at Rin. "What...?"

"I have to sedate you." Rin set her chin determinedly. "I wouldn't even try to heal your injured eye without sedating you; I'm not going to transplant one while you're conscious."

He fought it, but Rin's magic bore down on him, pushing him further and further into an unconscious state. The last thing he saw was Obito's lips twitch up into a small, satisfied smile. He couldn't fight the inexorable pull of Rin's magic. This was the last time he would see Obito; he had to say goodbye.

But his head hit the floor before he could get the words out. He knew he'd spend the rest of his life trying to say goodbye.


	3. Chapter 3

"Iruka!"

Someone yanked his pillow out from under his head. It wasn't enough to fully wake him up, but it startled him out of a truly deep sleep. "Mmf," he protested. He couldn't have gotten more than two or three hours of sleep, and his dreams had been less than restful. He could feel tight patches of skin on his cheeks from where his tears had dried.

"They said it's getting bad again."

Now that Kakashi mentioned it, Iruka could feel more behind the heavy exhaustion than a simple lack of sleep. He could feel the fire just starting to burn beneath his skin. His eyes flew open, and he sat up. The overabundance of magic wasn't nearly as bad as it had been earlier; with any luck, the Sharingan would be able to balance things out.

Kakashi was sitting on the edge of his bed, pillow clenched in one hand, staring at him. "You've got the..."

"Sharingan, I know." Iruka rubbed sleep out of his normal eye. "You can tell? I thought the brown color wasn't all that different from my normal eyes."

"The brown isn't... That's not the way the magic expresses itself."

Iruka remembered the dark-haired boy with the scarlet eyes from his dream. "Then..." He shoved off the bed and practically sprinted into the bathroom. He hadn't even thought to look in the mirror last night. In retrospect, he was glad. It probably would have unnerved him, to say the least.

His right eye remained the same. His left, on the other hand, was a vivid red with a second, thin ring of black around the pupil that supported two specks of black spaced evenly around the curve. He took a step back from the bathroom mirror, the dream all too clear in his mind. "I was you."

Kakashi had followed him to the bathroom and was watching him intently. His head jerked up, clearly taken aback. "What?"

"I dreamt about Rin and Obito." The words turned to ash in his mouth at the stricken look on Kakakshi's face. Throughout the entire dream, he'd felt the pain that their memory caused. It was brutal and everlasting. "Kakashi," he started, but he had no idea what to say. He'd lost people as well – his parents – and no words ever really helped. "I'm sorry," he said and then plowed right over Kakashi's derisive snort. "For prying. They're your memories. I didn't do it intentionally, but that still doesn't mean I had any business mucking around in them."

"It's not like you had any choice."

"Well, that's certainly true." The influx of Kakashi's memories confirmed what he'd suspected when he recognized the Sharingan last night. The turbo charge of power must have been coming from Kakashi's magic, but he couldn't figure out why. "What happened?"

"They were going to take my magic." Kakashi shook his head, as if he was replaying what had happened and looking for other options. "I didn't have any other choice."

Iruka turned and leaned against the bathroom sink so that he could see where Kakashi was slouched in the doorway. "They?"

"A woman and a boy; I didn't see their faces. Talented, though. The woman was casting a complicated spell on par with some of the highest level ones I saw in ANBU, and the containment circles she'd held me in were skillfully done."

"If they were that well done, how did you manage to get control of it? I mean, they can't have meant to send your magic to me."

Kakashi snorted. "No, they didn't, but I know how to get around the containment. It means that, while you can use your magic, it's horribly unwieldy. In order to actually accomplish anything," he hesitated. "You need a focus."

"And you just happened to have a focus handy? Oh." Iruka's eyes widened as he realized that Kakashi had, in fact, had a tailor-made focus literally stitched into his skin. "So it's not like you had any choice either. Sorry you got stuck with me."

Kakashi's face did something complicated behind his ubiquitous black mask, and Iruka resisted the urge to reach out and rip it off. Over the years, he'd learned that Kakashi was inscrutable under the best of circumstances, and the mask certainly did nothing to help. He always felt that he'd understand Kakashi better if he could just see his face.

When he'd asked about the mask, Kakashi'd told him that it was enchanted to filter germs from the air. Iruka hadn't believed him believe him for a second but figured it was a fairly personal question and hadn't begrudged Kakashi for the lie. Later, once they'd fully transitioned from colleagues to acquaintances to friends, Iruka realized that it was entirely plausible that Kakashi had been telling the truth. He wouldn't put it past him to be a germaphobe, but he also wouldn't be surprised if Kakashi had lied through his nose about it. He still hadn't decided which version to believe, and he hadn't asked again.

Regardless of the reason, Iruka'd slowly learned to interpret the minutiae of movements around Kakashi's eyes. Every once in a while, he caught Kakashi's face involved in an expression that he couldn't interpret. This was one of them. He waffled for a moment, considering the simple expedient of just asking him what was wrong, but decided that he could probably take a guess. Completely losing your magic was enough to make anyone flaky. He rubbed a hand across his face and shoved away from the bathroom sink. "Look, let's go see Tsunade. She might be able to get this sorted out."

Kakashi stared at him for a long moment, mouth working as if he was going to either comment or protest, but eventually decided against it.

Iruka lunged forward and grabbed his arm. "Stop moving."

"I'm not."

"You were going to."

"Well, we were just talking about leaving. Did you have some magical way to go see Tsunade without moving?" He drawled out the word 'magical' in the same way that people who had never encountered the real thing talked about card tricks.

Iruka dropped his arm and glared at him. "Don't be a smartass."

"You started it."

It was strictly true. Iruka had been responsible for the first smart comment of their friendship, and no matter how much he argued that Kakashi couldn't use that as an excuse to make smart comments during every subsequent conversation, he hadn't managed to convince Kakashi to stop. So he dealt with it the same way that he had the last 100 times this had happened – made a mental note, again, not to use that phrase, rolled his eyes, and ignored it. "Just stay behind me."

The bathroom had been stifling when he'd gone in there, but it seemed to have cooled down in the interim. The floor also tilted interestingly as he started to move, and he cursed under his breath. He hadn't been quite as amped up as earlier, and the Sharingan burned power faster than he expected. It would take a while to get the balancing act down. He staggered and squeezed his eye shut.

Kakashi caught him, letting Iruka lean against his chest for a moment to catch his balance before setting him back onto his feet. "Are you okay?"

Iruka was grateful for the momentary aid – his legs seemed convinced to be less than helpful in keeping him upright. He waved Kakashi off and walked slowly back to his bedroom. "I'm fine; I just need to find something." He let the words trail off even as he yanked open a drawer and started fishing into the very back corner. After a few minutes of searching, he pulled out a scrap of fabric with a triumphant grin.

"What is that?"

"I can't keep one eye shut forever. I'll look like a psychopath, and my eyelid will fall off." He paused in the doorway to wrestle with the two long ties attached to the fabric.

"You know how I deal with it."

"I am not getting a permanent tattoo for a nonpermanent problem." He ducked his head to line up the square of cloth with his eye and tied off the laces under his ponytail.

Kakashi peered at him and his rather pathetic, leftover Halloween costume eye patch. "Huh."

"What?"

"I didn't think of that."

Iruka goggled at him in disbelief before letting out a bark of laughter. "You thought of tattoo before you thought of eye patch?"

"You have to admit that it makes me look very suave and debonair."

He grabbed keys, wallet, and cell phone, then tucked them into his pockets, commenting offhandedly, "Only you could make a bunch of symbols and filigree around your eye look sexy."

Awkward silences were certainly more common at the beginning of this strange friendship than they were now, but that didn't mean that they still didn't happen. A casual observer might point out that comments like that between people who are friends and only friends don't make for awkward moments. Unfortunately, neither of them was casual enough to notice this. Iruka cast around for something to say, blaming the exhaustion and general lousy feeling that had disconnected the filter between his brain and his mouth.

"Very rakish, Iruka. Don't you think, boss?"

Trust the dogs to make it worse.

* * *

Tsunade ran the entire magical community in Konoha. This meant that she was: 1) a highly talented mage and 2) almost completely unreachable unless you booked an appointment several months in advance.

They solved the problem by simply ambushing her at the local coffee shop during her self-imposed 10-minute break. Kakashi knew that Iruka wouldn't hear the end of it from the dragons that guarded and scheduled her time, but Shizune would just have to deal with it. If he'd heard right, they were running out of time to catch the people who'd done this.

Tsunade took one look at them over the brim of her mug, eyebrows climbing, and said, "What the hell happened to you two?" At least it didn't look like she was going to bawl them out for absconding with her precious break. As situations go, the one that had landed in Kakashi's and Iruka's lap fairly clearly warranted unorthodox methods.

The summarized version took a little less than five minutes. When he'd finished, Tsunade sat back, clearly digesting the information. She laced her fingers together and eyed him. "They just let you go?"

That had surprised Kakashi too, when it'd happened. "I hadn't seen them, and besides the voices, there was nothing for me to identify them with." He paused. "I don't think they actually wanted to hurt me. That spell could have easily drained my magic and my life force – if they were looking for power, that would be the smart thing to do – but it was set up with a hard stop to keep from doing that. They left me with what any normal human would have, and they didn't have to."

"I'll take whatever you can give me in the way of description and pass it over to ANBU. You said they were on a deadline?"

"The new moon."

"Then they can't afford to lay low." She was silent for a long moment. "I'll put the ANBU out and hopefully we'll get our hands on them. In the meantime, let's see if we can get you two sorted out." She shoved her chair back and swiveled around to look fully at Iruka. "I've never seen anything like this," Tsunade admitted finally, scowling down at Iruka's torso and the tangle of magic there. "Given time, I might be able to come up with a reversal spell, but I can't promise anything."

Iruka tilted his head to one side. "Or we can just find out the easy way." He pointed at the Sharingan. "They're not going to be able to pass all of this up. I probably look like an all-you-can-eat buffet."

The suggestion was ludicrous – to use himself as bait in order to copy the spell using the Sharingan. It was dangerous and foolish, and Kakashi wasn't going to just stand by and let him suggest it. "No."

"I'm sorry, do you not want your magic back?"

"You're not going to throw yourself into some..."

"Dangerous situation that I can't handle? I can handle just about anything right now, and it's not like I'm planning to go without backup."

Once he'd acquired the Sharingan, it had taken Kakashi weeks to break the habit of finishing other people's sentences. He'd spent the entire walk over here being interrupted every other sentence, and this was one too many. "That is getting really annoying."

"You think it's getting annoying for you? At least you could turn it off. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to walk straight if I ever get rid of this thing, and the eye patch is not all it's cracked up to be." Iruka had smacked his knee on no fewer than three obstacles on the way over here and had needed to grab the doorframe when he came into the shop to make sure he actually made it through. "Figuring out a way to live with this – like getting the stylish face tattoo – is not an option. I'm going to fix this." He caught Kakashi's eye and sighed. "Relax, I'm not going to lose your magic to them."

"I'm not worried about that!" Kakashi snapped. "I'm worried about you losing yours. It feels like someone sawed off your leg while you weren't looking. I keep reaching for it and then realizing it's not there and I can't remember how I functioned before I had it readily available." How could Iruka have thought he was worried about himself? Living without his magic seemed impossible, but he'd never forgive himself if Iruka had to go through the same thing simply because Kakashi had seen fit to involve him.

"Which is why we're going to get yours back to you," Iruka shot back.

"You don't..."

"Hey, if you're allowed to worry about me, then I'm allowed to worry about you."

Tsunade looked from one to the other and finally dropped her hands down flat on the table, pushing herself away. "As much as I hate to break up this fascinating and enlightening discussion, how are you planning to get yourself captured by these psychopaths? Konoha isn't Tokyo, but it's not exactly tiny either. You can't just wander around and hope to get caught."

Although she had a good point, she didn't offer a solution. Kakashi tilted his head towards Iruka.

"Why are you looking at me?"

"It's your idiotic plan."

Iruka glared at him. "You said they mentioned something about the new moon?" He didn't even wait for Kakashi's affirmative before he was fishing a slim smart phone out of the front pocket of his jeans. Although almost every mage had the dates of the full moon in their back pocket, the new moon was less prevalent. As the lunar cycle reached its apex with the full moon, a mage's power peaked as well. The new moon, on the other hand, was more commonly associated with rebirth. He tapped rapidly on the screen. "We have a little under a week before their deadline – the new moon rises this Tuesday. Can you get one of your TNTs on it?" He asked Tsunade. Iruka would normally have been the first choice for a track and trap job, but with the level of magic flowing through him, he wouldn't have the delicacy to manage it without singeing, and therefore warning, the targets.

"I'll get someone on it, and I'll call you when we get something."

There was no mistaking that dismissal. Kakashi gave her a sardonic salute but dropped it to catch Iruka, who'd started to turn and immediately staggered. Iruka's shirtsleeves were rolled up to just above his elbows, and his bare skin practically scalded Kakashi's hands. "What...?"

"I have a feeling your ability to regenerate your magic is significantly better developed than mine."

"What makes you think that?"

"I don't run my tank down past empty on a weekly basis. Your body's been adjusting purely out of self preservation." Iruka leaned on Kakashi's arm to right himself and groaned in dismay even as he reached for the eyepatch. "There are going to be people everywhere, aren't there? How do you use this thing without making yourself motion sick?"

Kakashi didn't bother to answer; it wouldn't satisfy or help Iruka. Simply put, he didn't use it unless he had to. That usually meant that he was either fighting someone, in which case the adrenaline allowed for such superb tunnel vision that he wasn't bothered by the movements of bystanders, or he was trying to copy a specific spell from a very specific person, which also engendered tunnel vision. Other than that, he left it turned off. It used a huge amount of magic and, for the most part, the benefits didn't outweigh the splitting headache that came from a brain swamped with far too much predictive information. An idea struck him, and he reached out to stop Iruka's hand. "Will you be okay for the next," he paused to estimate the distance, "twenty minutes or so?"

"I think so. I can always toss the eye patch if I need to."

He stepped away from Tsunade's table and Tsunade, who was eyeing both of them suspiciously. "Come on."

"Try not to demolish the whole neighborhood!" She called after them.

Kakashi waved a hand in the air over his shoulder, ignoring Iruka's worried questions about what exactly she thought they were going to be doing. This would be payback of a fashion – like bringing back a souvenir for someone after they house-sat for you. If nothing else, it would be more pleasant than simply turning the Sharingan on and not really using it for its intended purpose.

Assuming Iruka didn't manage to kill them in the process, but Kakashi'd had four years to watch Iruka demonstrate iron-tight control and precision that made simple tracking spells that should have been easily avoided practically undetectable and successful against some extraordinarily talented mages. He wasn't worried.

* * *

"Are you breaking in?"

Kakashi chose to blame the rude insinuation on the fact that the nearly forty-five minutes it had taken them to get here – Kakashi was rubbish at estimating time when he was traveling via such a mundane means as walking – had taken its toll on Iruka. He turned and jingled a key ring a few inches from Iruka's face, and then he stuck the key back in the lock and wrenched it around until the disused lock gave way.

He almost never used the front door. When his mother had finally taught it to him, teleportation had been a favorite – it required skill and strength and had felt like a right of passage at the time, a demonstration of his talents as a mage. It also saved massive amounts of time, giving him that much more opportunity to learn other spells when he wasn't wasting his time getting from one place to another. He used it so incessantly that it became second nature. When he was in range, he would simply zap straight to his living room or, if he wasn't bleeding to egregiously, his library.

He was lucky he'd had his keys on him at all.

Iruka rocked back on his heels, eyeing the low porch that encircled the entire building. "Is this your house?"

As if in response, the entire pack of Kakashi's familiars came skidding around the corner of the house, claws scrambling on the polished wood. A rousing chorus of 'Boss!' also helped announce them, and they slid more-or-less to a halt. Bisuke and Akino didn't turn on their brakes quite early enough and collided gently with Iruka's shins before stopping. Tails thunked happily against the floor.

"You have a house. How did I not know that you have a house?" Iruka sounded bemused and followed Kakashi into the house, craning his head around to get a good look at his surroundings.

"Where did you think I lived?"

"I thought you were nomadic."

"You wound me with your assumptions, Iruka." He kicked the door shut behind them and the dogs.

The dogs wove around their legs across the narrow hallway to the sliding door on the far side. They were almost always eager to get to the dojo because they could lounge in the sun around the outside.

Kakashi pushed the door open and ushered Iruka through, grinning at the look of stunned amazement that crossed Iruka's face.

The dojo took up the majority of the central part of the house, with all of Kakashi's living spaces arranged around the outside. The center of it was carpeted in soft grass and opened to the sky. A partial ceiling protected the benches, cabinets, and well-loved dog beds that lined the outside.

He stepped sideways around Iruka, who was still blocking the door, and swept the eye patch off his eye with a graceful gesture. "Watch," he instructed, waited until Iruka tore his eyes away from the scene, and formed several deliberate hand signs that allowed him to initiate and focus the spell. It would be interesting to see if this would work. He had no magic to actually complete the spell, and so it was entirely possible that, to the Sharingan, it looked like he was simply making a series of complicated, albeit predictable, hand gestures.

Copying spells wasn't simply about knowing the components – the written characters, the hand gestures, and any material goods – although that probably encompassed 90% of what the Sharingan did; it was also about how the magic was used. Applying magic at the beginning versus the end of the spell produced very different results – sort of like putting baking soda in cookies after they were baked instead of before. It wasn't a perfect analogy because throwing out a boost of magic at the end of spell didn't always result in disaster. Even the way magic was applied affected the results. A slow, constant push would do something different than a sharp spike.

Most mages would tell you that all spells – within your affinity, but that was another argument for another day – could be learned given enough time, enough practice, and enough magic at hand. The Sharingan took the need for time and practice out of the equation, but that was assuming you were copying from a fully functioning mage who had mastered the spell in question.

Iruka watched him, brow furrowed in concentration, and matched his movements. The air surrounding the grassy center of the dojo rung like a struck crystal and a faint shimmer rent the air at the point closest to them.

"Protective spells?" Iruka asked.

Kakashi swallowed his surprise before answering. He'd hoped it would work, but he hadn't really expected it to. "Keeps everything in. Magic, physical items, everything."

"I was wondering where you'd been letting Naruto train."

"He probably would have leveled half the city by now if I'd let him practice outdoors," Kakashi agreed, a hint of pride coloring his voice.

"Letting him have any more than a block of demolition to his name really would have been too much," Iruka laughed and turned, and some of Kakashi's shock must have still shown on his face, because Iruka's gaze dropped to his hands. He flexed them thoughtfully and then touched the corner of his eye. "It's odd. You weren't backing any of that up with magic, but it's almost like I could see where you were trying to use it, so I knew..." Iruka trailed off, his jaw setting in a hard line. "Come hell or high water, we are getting this fixed. I may need to fight them. Teach me."

"Battle magic isn't one of your affinities."

"No, but it's yours." Iruka stepped through the shimmering window in the protective spells. "The Sharingan is an innate ability – the people who have it are born with it or they've acquired it physically – but it's clearly inextricably bound to your magic or I wouldn't have gotten it. Whatever this is, whatever they did, it transferred more than just your raw power. It transferred the metadata as well."

"You think my magic is still earmarked with my...?"

"Affinities, yes. Only one way to find out. Show me how to close this."

Magic affinities were as innately ingrained in a person as personalities. Some people were born fighters, others born liars and sneaks, and others born healers. Some affinities were so common that people never even thought to mention them. For example, most people have some modicum of self-preservation so an affinity for protection spells, like the shield spell Kakashi had just showed Iruka how to open, were common. Very few mages had a single affinity, although some combinations were stranger than others. Tsunade and Sakura, for example, had battle and healing affinity.

Kakashi had at least a pinch of affinity for all variations. It was one of the reasons the Sharingan worked so well for him – he had the ability to put his magic towards just about any spell. Without an affinity, even the most skilled mages found it extremely difficult verging on impossible to apply their magic to even a simple spell outside their affinity.

Iruka's main flavor of magic was technically characterized as sneak magic, although almost all of the stand-up TNTs were lobbying to get that nomenclature changed. The original classification had broken magic into battle, healing and sneak, with the understanding that if you weren't willing to meet your opponent head on with battle magic, you were cowardly indeed.

The original classification authority had been composed of the thick-headed bruisers of the magical community. This had been ameliorated later by instigating sub-categories that were significantly better named, but the main category remained.

Iruka also held the common affinity for protective magic and a touch of affinity for healing magic but not even a gnat's whisker of an affinity for battle magic. If he could manage to execute any of the battle spells, they would draw from Kakashi's magic alone.

Kakashi grimaced at the thought. Granted, he'd brought Iruka here with the specific intention to teach him new spells, but he hadn't been planning on choosing any from his vast collection of battle magic - they wouldn't do Iruka any good in the long run and it was nice to have one friend completely free of battle magic. He'd been understandably worried about trying even non-battle magic spells with Iruka given the amount of magic currently at Iruka's disposal.

Even Tsunade had recognized his skittishness and had called him out on it, but she hadn't seen the inch-thick rind of ice that had covered Iruka's bathroom. She hadn't realized what he was capable of with his new-found strength.

Battle magic was tumultuous under the best of circumstances, but the protective spells would hold it in, and he'd be careful to pick spells that wouldn't stand a chance of hurting Iruka.

The seals for closing the shield spell were so well-practiced that he didn't even have to spare a second thought for them. It was decidedly strange to watch Iruka mirroring his actions with only a half a heartbeat of delay, but the shimmering between them faded and the shield spell went back to being wholly closed and undetectable.

"Alright." Iruka backed into the center of the circle.

Kakashi had a catalog of spells roughly 400 miles long thanks to the Sharingan, but there were a few that he commonly used that always sat near the top of his memory. The one he decided to start with was technically battle magic although he had always used it as a rather showy and dramatic deterrent. He walked through the seals quickly, feeling himself reach for magic that wasn't there.

Iruka finished a half a second after him, and a roiling circle of flame exploded around him. He let out a startled shout, from surprise, not pain – Kakashi's spell was carefully constructed to conjure the flames far enough away from the wielder to not pose any threat – and spun on the spot. Concentration lost, the flames flickered and died. "So that's battle magic?"

"Not bad for your...," he teased, meeting Iruka's huffed out laugh with a smile.

"First try?" Iruka gave him a rueful grin. "You flatter me to assume that this was my first try at using battle magic. But I do have to say that this was significantly more successful."

Another spell to try was right on the tip of Kakashi's tongue when he realized something. "You were surprised at what the spell did even though you saw it."

Iruka had been shaking his hands out and resetting himself in the center of the circle. "I didn't. I can see what you're doing, but since you can't actually activate the spell..." He let the sentence trail off.

A verbal reminder wasn't any more unpleasant than the constant, nagging void within Kakashi. He shrugged it away. Dwelling on it wouldn't do any good, and his magic was being stored in about the only place he would have considered safe. He tossed that thought aside as well despite the fact that it could probably benefit from a closer examination. "Let's try another one."

"Are you going to let me know what this one is?" He paused for a second and then, as Kakashi was about to open his mouth, exclaimed, "Lightning?"

"You really need to stop doing that."

"Doing what?"

"Finishing my sentences."

"I am not...,"Iruka began to protest and then hesitated. "Am I?"

"It's one of the frustrating side effects of the Sharingan."

"I thought I was saying it with you or just after. Is that why there's that weird echo?"

"Afraid so."

Iruka cocked his head to one side and shook it as if that would clear the echo of Kakashi's voice. "How did you deal with this?"

"Generally, if I had it on, there wasn't a lot of talking happening."

This time, Iruka left an unnaturally long silence after Kakashi finished talking. "Alright, I think I can hear it, and if I just wait for a little bit, I can be sure you're done."

"Like an overseas phone call."

Iruka laughed and lifted his hands up again. "So you were going to teach me to call lightning?"

"Something like that," Kakashi murmured and began the seals for the spell.

A spluttering globe filled Iruka's hand, popping and cracking with vague ominousness. Kakashi had never really seen it from the outside, and he had to admit that it looked rather like Iruka was holding a lit firecracker in his hand. He didn't blame Iruka for the wary look he was casting at the ball of sparking light. "It's your own magic, so it won't hurt you."

Iruka moved his hand slowly through the air. The air molecules snapped and protested. "What happens if I hit something with it?"

"The magic won't hurt you, but the flying debris is under no such compulsion."

"Right." He took a deep breath and let it out. It was a common technique for gathering your wits around you before releasing a spell's magic. The ball of contained lightning shrunk until it disappeared completely from his palm.

Unlike the ring of flames, that particular spell wasn't used just for posturing. Kakashi scanned Iruka's face, looking for some sign that Iruka had sensed the darkness, pain, and, in general, death that surrounded that spell. It was battle magic at its most raw – a fighting technique that was really only ever used for one thing. To Kakashi's great relief, he couldn't find a trace of that realization on Iruka's face. Some of his memories had clearly transferred with his magic, but he didn't know if his emotions had as well. He had never used that spell in a way he'd regretted, but that didn't mean that he'd liked what he had to do with it.

He'd taught the spell to Iruka solely because he knew that Iruka was right. This situation could very well end with Iruka fighting, and he wanted to give him the best chance he could to come out of the other end of it alive and unharmed. He hoped Iruka would never have to use it.

In the hour that followed, they tried a dozen or so more spells, all common battle magic, all ones that would give Iruka a leg up in any fights between him and the mage that had tried to steal Kakashi's magic.

The last couple of spells had been more on the nonlethal side. Although they still fell under the umbrella of battle magic, they worked better as deterrents than as actual attacks. Kakashi remembered another nonlethal spell – one that had rocked him back on his heels and was the magical equivalent of getting sand tossed in his face. He closed his eyes as he finished the final seal, but the bright flash of light still left after images on the inside of his eyelids. When he opened them again and had blinked enough to clear his vision, he noticed that Iruka had dropped to one knee in the center of the circle, a look of surprise plastered across his face.

"That." Iruka braced his hand on his knee and stood up. "Was not battle magic."

Kakashi blinked. One of the problems with having an affinity for everything was that you never really knew where each spell belonged. Had he learned them out of a book, he might have had a better handle on it, but as it was, he simply had to use the situation as his best judge. He'd learned that spell in a fight and so he had assumed it was battle magic. It wasn't a spectacular assumption, but it was the best he could go with. "Are you sure?"

"Positive. That one pulled from my magic as well." Iruka braced his hands on his knees and leaned forward, clearly catching his breath. "It's a lot easier to control one person's magic at a time. The battle spells couldn't touch mine, so I was only managing yours. I wasn't expecting quite so much of a flood of magic with that one."

"I thought it was a little brighter than I'd intended."

Iruka laughed and sank to the ground. "I think we've managed to exhaust your magic. I'm starting to feel more like myself again." He formed the seals to call lightning to himself again and spread his right hand. A tiny spark appeared there, flickered anemically, and vanished. "I don't feel like I've been hooked up to the magical equivalent of a fire hydrant and asked to water the garden anymore."

The sun had climbed past its apex as they worked and was beating down on the dojo. Under the awning, between the shade and the slight breeze, the heat was manageable. Inside the protective shield, which let in the light but kept out the breeze, it must have been sweltering. Iruka plucked at the front of his shirt and then paused to swipe a sleeve across his brow. "I'm starting to regret the decision to wear jeans."

The spells had burned off Kakashi's magic, which put Iruka in a more tenable state. A few spells here and there over the next few hours should be enough to keep him from overpowering himself again.

Kakashi stepped back away from the shield, beckoning to Iruka with the eye patch. "Come on."

Iruka opened the shield, took the eye patch, and stepped gratefully into the breeze. He turned his face into the fresh air and inhaled deeply. His shirt was plastered to his chest, partly from the heat, partly from the exertion the magic had required.

"I'm going to call Tsunade and see if there's any news. Do you want...?"

"To use your shower?" Iruka met Kakashi's glare with a wicked grin. He would be the type of person to use his newfound powers to piss people off.

Kakashi pointed wordlessly. Had the situation been different, he would have countered with some sort of well-crafted innuendo. But he'd seen the disdainful twist of Iruka's lips after each spell – recognizing the need for battle magic and actually desiring to use it were two completely different things. Iruka's mind was clearly filling in images of what these spells could do when aimed at people, and, like Kakashi, he didn't like what he saw. Kakashi kicked himself out of that thought cycle. Necessity was necessity, and this might mean the difference between Iruka coming back with magic as opposed to coming back without.

The moment for well-crafted innuendo had passed, but he wouldn't let the opportunity pass. "Don't worry, I know this is just an excuse to get naked in my house," he called after Iruka. It wasn't his best effort, but it elicited the desired spluttering cough and protest.


	4. Chapter 4

The sound of water hitting tile echoed softly down the hall as Kakashi hung up and slipped his cell phone back into the front project of his jeans. After a fair amount of bartering with Tsunade's dragon of a secretary – not literally, although she may have been a descendent – he'd managed to get in contact with Tsunade directly only to discover that she didn't have any more information for him.

The TNT mages she hired were the best after Iruka, but they had nothing to work with. They were, at the moment, sorting through reports and trying to dig up previous, similar incidents to develop a physical trail. That kind of legwork took time.

He padded into the bedroom, dogs in tow, and wondered if it would be finished in time. The culprits were likely to vanish after the new moon, and they could very well take the secrets of their spell with them. He chewed on his lip as he sorted through his drawers, pulling out a handful of clothing that was likely to fit Iruka, even if it wasn't his style.

He leaned in and hooked the pile of clothes out with a foot, careful not to cross the threshold with his entire body. Early on in their friendship, the morning after a particularly long night of tracking spell instruction, Kakashi had walked into the bathroom while Iruka was taking a shower, intent on brushing his teeth. He still hadn't heard the end of it.

He tossed the clean clothes in blindly, pulled the door shut again, and headed back to the living room. He scratched Bull behind the ears as he passed and settled down to wait.

He waited and waited.

When the time elapsed was pushing an hour and a half and the shower was still running, Kakashi's concern trampled over his better judgment. Perhaps the magic had burned faster and hotter than Iruka'd thought. Perhaps that light spell had devoured a good chunk of Iruka's magic along with the last of Kakashi's. The first night, he'd found Iruka blue and shivering, huddled on the floor of the shower and unable to move. The scene had dropped icy cold fear into the pit of his stomach, and it was not something he wanted to see repeated. He pressed his ear against the door and knocked, but he couldn't hear anything over the patter of water.

After very little hesitation, he pushed the door open and called out Iruka's name as he went.

The curtain rattled back along its rail, and Iruka practically burst out of the shower, shaking glowing motes of magic from his hand – a side effect of one of his favorite tracking spells. "I found them! Well, not them exactly. I found where they're going to be working the spell - or where they worked it last time, to be precise – but a complex spell like that would require set up and they're not likely to move to a new location every time if they have to do that." He scooped up his phone from the counter, pulled up a map of Konoha, and jabbed his finger at a location on the outskirts of town. "I can't track them, but I can track your magic and see where it's been. It happened right here, and that's bound to be close to their hunting grounds because they're not going to lug unconscious bodies very far and... and... I'm naked again, aren't I?"

The fingers of fear clenched around his heart eased, and Kakashi magnanimously raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Still doing my best not to notice." He hadn't looked up quite fast enough to miss the flush spreading at light speed down Iruka's neck and chest.

"Anyway," Iruka's voice was muffled behind cloth. "We should rally the troops and get this plan in action."

The tendrils of fear locked tight around his heart again. He'd offered token protests during the meeting with Tsunade and had hoped he'd have more of a chance to talk Iruka out of the insane plan. Chances were slim that the mage would kill Iruka – she'd let Kakashi go even when it would have been prudent to murder him and dump him somewhere – but the spell she worked had the possibility to change him for good just as surely as death would have.

"Nothing I can say will change your mind about this, will it?" He asked after a long pause where he considered and discarded a dozen arguments.

"You didn't see your face while I was wielding your spells." Iruka stepped into his line of sight and rested a hand on Kakashi's arm. "Kakashi, I can't imagine functioning without my magic; I don't know how you're doing it, and I don't want you to have to do it any longer than you have to."

"I don't want you to get hurt because of me." The words fell out of his mouth before he'd given them permission – he'd intended to brush the comment off. He hadn't countered it at the time, but having Iruka worry about him still rubbed him the wrong way. He'd been alone and self-sufficient for so long that he'd long since forgotten what it was like to be cared for, outside of his dogs.

Iruka had latched onto his dogs' fanatical devotion to Kakashi and had gleefully enlisted them in nagging Kakashi about everything from getting medical attention to getting a good meal in his belly. He'd wormed his way into Kakashi's life.

As terrifying as it was, Kakashi had gotten somewhat used to Iruka's constant presence in his life, even if he still disliked the fact that, the more Iruka was around, the more often he became entangled in Kakashi's problems. Admitting that out loud, admitting any fear engendered from this strange companionship, would let Iruka even farther in. He scrambled for a way to salvage it and finally said, "Naruto would kill me."

Iruka chuckled softly, "He'd try."

There was truth behind those words, but not only would Naruto have a problem if something happened to Iruka, but Kakashi wasn't sure that he'd handle it all that well. He could count the number of people he'd let heal him on one hand, and had it been anyone else, he would have actually stopped to think about throwing his magic at them. Not because Asuma, Kurenai, or Gai couldn't handle it, but because his magic was an intimate piece of himself, as evidenced by the dreams it had already treated Iruka to. He simply couldn't imagine sharing that with them. Sharing it with Iruka terrified him, but not as much as it should have.

That fact alone spoke volumes. Kakashi resolutely ignored it and proceeded to distract himself from the fact that he was ignoring it by calling Tsunade.

* * *

The plan hinged on having irresistible bait. Iruka lay on the bed in Kakashi's guest room and tried not to remind himself that he had the dubious honor of being said bait. At that particular moment, he wasn't much to write home about when it came to bait. The spells Kakashi had taught him had done a fantastic job in burning Kakashi's magic out of his system, and Iruka looked like himself to magical eyes.

The magic inside him needed a chance to recuperate. Even though Tsunade had managed to summon a handful of mages to support Iruka and his hare-brained scheme, they were all sitting on their thumbs. It must have been a truly exciting assignment: waiting for Iruka to become more desirable as bait.

He lay in the center of the bed and willed sleep to claim him because sitting around waiting for his magic to build back up was akin to watching grass grow or particularly fascinating paint dry. Sleep, thankfully, crept up on him and wrestled him down into haphazard dreams.

Splashes of images filled Iruka's mind, one after the other: interiors and exteriors of places that weren't Konoha, rising mountain spires topped with snow, a rough sand beach bordering a gray, storm-tossed sea, a trashed apartment with a shattered window and harsh, angular script scrawled in blood across the worn carpet. But no matter where he was, there were always people hovering at the edge of his vision, ANBU masks firmly in place to protect their anonymity. The skulking, twisted aura of magic used to kill and maim permeated each scene, and, more often than not, if he tilted his head down, a draped corpse was bleeding anemically onto the ground at his feet.

The necessity of his actions warred with a sick, wrenching in his gut. Despite an intense, infallible conviction that the corpses at his feet had to be stopped at all costs, he felt no satisfaction with the success. Over and over, the scenery changed, but the feelings and the presence of a dead body at his feet did not.

The wave-tossed beach suddenly snapped back into horrible focus. He'd been out; he'd washed his hands of this whole mess, but here he was, the burden of a mask on his face dragging his head down inexorably until he could do nothing but focus on the mage lying dead before him.

He never should have let them talk him into coming back, but he was the only one who'd faced this particular opponent before and while that didn't exactly put him at an advantage, he still had a leg up on the rest of ANBU. Winning was small consolation when the mage's spells had lain open his forearms and several spots along the arch of his cheekbone. Blood slowly seeped from the gashes, but he made no move to wipe it away. His hands were already coated with the mage's blood, so it wouldn't do him any good.

When he turned on his heel and stalked off the beach, the blank faces of the surrounding ANBU followed him. The wind smelled of sea foam and rain while it tugged at his shirt and threw sand against his mask. When he reached the edge of the parking lot, magic flared at his back, and he turned to watch the ANBU setting up illusion spells to hide the blood soaked beach. The Sharingan could see through them, but he pressed a finger to the edge of his eye and sent a spark of magic to turn it off. The ANBU, the corpse, and the blood vanished to be replaced an unmarred expanse of beach. He let the ocean beyond draw his eye.

The waves rose, swelled, and swamped the beach and the parking lot in the truly impossible way only allowed by dreams. He let them rush over him.

When the encompassing darkness cleared, he was standing before an ordinary door, hands still bloody and mask still a heavy weight on his face. The caution-sign yellow mat beneath his feet was turned so it was legible when you were leaving the apartment. It read: "Spell You Later!"

A gift from Naruto, and he thought it was hilarious.

The obnoxious yellow was somehow homey and comforting, a feeling that was entirely in opposition to his presence. He tore the mask from his face, buried it as deeply under his arm as he could as if he could negate the fact that he'd worn it simply by hiding it well enough, and raised a hand to knock. The mage's blood trickled from his clenched hand and spattered on the door. He froze.

He couldn't will himself to rap on the door. His past had no business tangling with his present. The TNT assignments sometimes tackled less-than-savory mages, and he had seen the look of grim satisfaction on Iruka's face once the trap was sprung. His actions were certainly more sanctioned than those mages Iruka trapped, but that didn't make them any more palatable. If he had his way, his time and actions in ANBU would remain with ANBU forever.

But buried secrets fester, and as much as he wanted to keep those cards close to his chest, he would have given anything for that door to fly open, for his past to be forced from him, for someone the shoulder the burden of who he was and what he'd done.

The door remained firmly shut, and he turned from it and vanished into the darkness.

Iruka sat up, sleep forgotten, and tried to shake the dregs of the dream from his mind. It was strange to think of himself in the third person, stranger still to get a personal window into Kakashi's mind.

Ambient light from the city outside spilled in through unshuttered windows, lighting just enough of a path that Iruka could pick his way through the unfamiliar house to the master suite where he'd showered only a few hours earlier. He slipped through the door, and his eyes fell on the multitude of lumps on Kakashi's bed. He heard a couple of half-hearted thumps from wagging tails and crossed the intervening space quickly, running his hand over a back there and a head here before he settled on the edge of the bed.

At least Kakashi looked like he was fast asleep. Iruka wasn't sure – he'd learned not to go with his first assumptions – but he didn't particularly care. It was certainly easier to chide him for being boneheaded when he at least appeared to be asleep, but he was going to have to hear the words when he was awake at some point. "You idiot," Iruka sighed, "You should have knocked. We all have skeletons, you know. I'm not going to judge you for doing what you had to."

Urushi whined and nudged at Iruka's hand until he was rewarded with a good scratch under his chin.

"He's an idiot."

"We know," the dogs chorused back.

OOOOOOO

The communication spell was a comfort – at least he knew someone was listening and could summon the cavalry if need be – but also intensely annoying. His left ear was filled with barely intelligible muttering, and it was making it hard to look convincingly alone when he kept wanting to hiss, "Shut up!" to no one in particular. As it was, he ducked his head against the drizzling rain, ignored the scattered people hustling past him. Thanks to the Sharingan, he was warned just in time to step quickly to one side to avoid the spray thrown up by a passing car. It wasn't all bad, but there were enough people and activity going on around him, that his stomach protested the use of the eye as he walked. His stomach could shove it; if he was put in the same immobilization spell Kakashi had been in, he wouldn't be able to pull off the eye patch. He could have kept his eye closed, but he'd take any warning he could get that he was about to be jumped.

Two streets up, and Kakashi had cut into a narrow alley to shorten his trip across the city. As an ex-ANBU and battle mage, it hadn't occurred to him to avoid the seedier parts of the city that began just off this road. Most people recognized the mages of Konoha on sight, and Kakashi's reputation usually preceded him.

Iruka cut into the dank, trash-strewn alley. The wind whipped up a couple of plastic bags around his ankles. He was rapidly approaching the point where Kakashi had been taken but saw no sign of anyone.

A motorcycle roared past on the main road, and when Iruka turned toward the sound, the faintest flicker of black within the darker shadows beneath a fire escape caught the corner of his eye. It took every ounce of practiced innocence to keep the fact that he'd spotted it from showing on his face. It took even more effort to suppress his sense of self-preservation enough to turn his back on it. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up in what some people called paranoia. Those people were idiots. That reaction was highly honed from years of not being the dominant predator on the planet, and only morons ignored the warning.

Iruka gritted his teeth, resolutely kept his gaze forward, and was rewarded with a strike on the back of the head that made the world swim. To add insult to injury, the blow came from behind and so the Sharingan did him no good.

Rough rock dug into his cheek when he woke. He peeled his eyes open, only to be met with an expanse of rock filling his vision. All he could make out was an arc of symbols in front of him – the suppression spell Kakashi had warned him about. A brief wriggle and a suffocating weight between his shoulders proved that it was as well-cast as he'd been told.

A voice behind him said, "He's moving."

Iruka fought down a sense of déjà vu from something that hadn't actually happened to him and swore mentally. He was on his stomach, facing the wrong way, and he could see little more than if they'd bothered to blindfold him. So far the plan was spectacularly unsuccessful.

The noise coming from the communication spell rose to a torrent until one voice broke over the others. "...know it's not going to work. We should get him out of there."

It sounded like Kurenai. He snorted into the fine layer of dirt covering the rough-hewn floor and thought furiously at them, "Give me a chance." If luck were on his side tonight, the suppression circle wouldn't affect the communication spell because the magic had already been in place. Regardless of whether or not they heard him, he had little time. He coughed into the dirt again and called out, "Please."

The voices behind him faltered.

"Please! I...I can't breath. It," he let his breath hitch in simulated pain. "Please, it hurts."

"We didn't hurt you," the woman said it as if enough conviction would make it true. "Be quiet. This won't take long, and then you'll be free to go."

"Please, it's my rib. I broke it two days ago." He could feel that conviction wavering. Given how they'd behaved, he highly doubted these two were murders, and he truly doubted that either of them wanted their targets to suffer. Had they been stealing magic from full-fledged mages, there would have been a rash of reports about it.

"If he broke his rib, lying on it would hurt," the boy pointed out.

"I'm not going to break the suppression spell," she hissed back. "He'll survive until we're finished."

"You don't have to break it," Iruka called out, muffling a sob of false pain in the ground. "Just turn me over." Having broken a rib or two in his time, he knew that wouldn't stop the pain entirely, but it would make it more bearable.

"That'd be okay, right?"

"He'll see us."

"But you could wipe his memory. He's in pain. We shouldn't leave him there in pain."

There was a long, decisive silence, and then tendrils of magic wrapped around his arms and unceremoniously flipped him over. He grunted and gritted his teeth as if riding out a swell of pain. In reality, he was hoping he hadn't gone deaf from the shout of triumph in his ear.

Ambience wasn't strictly necessary for any spell, but that didn't stop a great number of mages from relying heavily on the right setting to help them focus. The cavern Iruka found himself in could have been featured in any B-movie right down to the multitude of candles that cast shifting, riotous shadows across the walls.

Most people who didn't hang around with mages came to the conclusion that mages were either luddites or that they felt that a certain air was expected and were all too happy to comply. They were partly correct – no spell actually needed candles just like no spell needed complex inscriptions or chants; people needed that. Magic was never easy to control, and the trappings that mages added into their spells were all in the name of focus and control. Simple spells typically had no additional hoo-hah around them.

This was not a simple spell.

Besides the candles set out in a rough ellipse surrounding all three of them, the floor was veritably carpeted in line after line of twisting symbols. One set snaked across the floor to form a figure eight that encircled first Iruka and then the young boy on the far end. A spar jutted from the center and blossomed into a triple of ring of inscriptions. The mage stood directly in the center, her arms loose by her side, and her head bowed. After taking a deep breath, she began to chant.

He craned his head to get a good look at the myriad of inscriptions on the floor around him even as his ears catalogued every syllable issuing from her mouth. His head felt like it was going to burst from the influx of information, and his eye ached from the stress it was putting on the Sharingan. Regardless, he could feel the knowledge growing in his brain and knew he was getting what he needed.

The whole room thronged with magic, the inescapable hum practically vibrating his teeth. Her voice rose to a crescendo, heading towards the end of the chant with a triumphant shout. He had what he needed – the means to control the spell nestled safely in the back of his brain – now he just needed to figure out how to get her to stop.

Even through the sweltering miasma of the mage's magic, Iruka could feel a sudden lance of power, formidable and precise. It pinned him to the floor just as surely as the suppression spell had even though it wasn't aimed at him and ricocheted off on of the columns supporting the roof.

The column shuddered and gave way, spilling rock and debris across the floor. Some of the fragments followed paths that wholly defied the laws of physics such that the rubble missed all of the humans in the room entirely. It did not, however, miss the spell components. A fist-sized chunk smashed into one set of etched inscriptions and obliterated several of the key characters at the heart of it. Another knocked over one of the candles that the mage had been using to help her focus and weave her magic.

Any sane mage would have abandoned the spell at this point. With this level of complication, any variation in the set-up could have dire consequences, but she was too deeply ensconced at this point to even notice the havoc going on around her.

"Chiyo!" The boy's voice was panicked. He may not have been a mage, but he knew the danger she was putting herself in.

The debris had not broken the circle around Iruka – whoever had been controlling it had clearly worried about the risks of getting it close to him without injuring him. He couldn't move, and, although he'd listened carefully to Kakashi's explanation of the finer points of using magic inside a suppression circle before he'd started this whole thing, he still wouldn't have much control over any magic he used that way.

In the long run, it didn't matter. If the mage didn't stop, she was likely to kill herself, Iruka, and anyone unlucky enough to be standing within 100 feet of the epicenter.

Iruka was out of time. He needed to distract her badly enough that she faltered and stopped. He scooped up as much as he could of the magic rioting around inside him and threw it into the oldest spell he could remember learning, one that was so ingrained that he didn't even really think of it as a spell anymore but rather just a useful tool that he could turn on and off at will. He turned his head so that he could focus on the mage standing at the center of the chamber and whispered, "Light."

Burning, golden light flooded the room, highlighting every harsh edge and divot in the rock walls. With all of Iruka's and Kakashi's magic behind it, it did a fair impersonation of a small star dropped into the center of the room. Unable to cover his eyes, Iruka squeezed them shut in an effort that only mitigated the blinding light, but didn't cut it out entirely. Shouts erupted from the room's other occupants, and the magic that had been steadily building faltered.

The light hadn't hurt, but the magic loosed by the mage when she lost her concentration certainly had. The release of rampant magic had fractured the floor, and the slab underneath Iruka had tilted wildly. He slid down it until his feet slammed into the still competent stone at the bottom. At least the fractures had broken the suppression circle. As soon as he caught his breath, he'd get himself out of here.

He heard footsteps on the floor behind him, a scuffle, and then someone landed on the rock above him. Strong hand slipped under his arms and started to drag him backwards. As soon as he got his feet underneath him, he helped as much as he could even though his shoes kept slipping on the angled rock. He gasped, "I'm okay. I'm okay," but only started to believe it once he was on level ground again.

The hand righted him and spun him around, and he found himself staring into Kakashi's bloodless face. The fear that played around Kakashi's eyes was almost more unnerving than the rest of the events. Iruka opened his mouth to say something more reassuring.

Kakashi cut him off by pulling Iruka tightly to his chest, fingers clutching at the back of Iruka's shirt. He buried his head in Iruka's shoulder and just held onto him in pure desperation.

Caught by surprise, Iruka fumbled with what to do with his hands for a moment, finally settling one on the nape of Kakashi's neck and wrapping the other around his back. "Hey. Hey," he repeated when Kakashi didn't seem to take any notice that he was speaking. "I'm okay."

They stood like that until Kakashi's shaking had subsided. Just from the dreams, Iruka could recognize the fear that boiled through him: fear of losing another person, of losing another constant in his life, of having to decide again whether it was worth it to let someone in when the next possibility for companionship came along.

Fear of loss was a terrible thing to combat – no reassurances could be 100% guaranteed – but Iruka had news that would at least help. He nudged Kakashi's head with his shoulder until Kakashi finally looked up at him, and he grinned triumphantly. "I got it."

* * *

In the aftermath, neither the mage nor the boy had put up a fight against the ANBU who had rushed in to capture them, too shaken by the explosive end to the spell to even consider running. Both were captured and pulled in for interrogation.

Kakashi and Iruka passed the interrogation room on their way to Tsunade's office, but they were too desperate to get Kakashi's magic restored to do much more than glance in briefly before going to meet Tsunade. The spell to unravel Kakashi's magic from Iruka couldn't be cast by either of the two people involved in the transfer, so Iruka had taught it to Tsunade, and they'd both trusted to her vast experience and skill to safely restore Kakashi's magic. The final result had been a mixture of the spell Iruka'd copied, commonplace healing magic, and some of Tsunade's own unique brand of magic thrown in for good measure. It left them feeling a little singed, but more-or-less back to normal, and a rudimentary check of their systems confirmed that it had worked properly.

Had Kakashi and Iruka not had to enlist Tsunade's help to help set everything right between them and their magic, they wouldn't have gotten a first-hand look at the mage who'd almost torn Kakashi's life apart. At her insistence, they'd followed her down the hall after the spell was complete and found themselves on the backside of a two-way mirror.

The mage, Chiyo, sat at a wide metal table with handcuffs that both suppressed her magic and kept her from running looped around her wrists and through a metal ring set in the table's edge. She was talking rapidly. "We weren't taking anything that would be noticed! Their abilities were simple – like finding something that they were looking for right next to them instead of where they'd left it. They didn't even know they had magic. We promised that we wouldn't steal from anyone who would miss it, but then time was running out and...," she paused, her face twisting unhappily. "He's dying!"

He was, in fact, dying. He had a small bit of magical talent – not enough to become a true mage, but enough that, when his body had started to reject his magic, he began to fall apart from the inside out. The spell that Chiyo had been attempting was a form of transplant. Something had gone rotten in his magic, and the only way to fix it was to replace it. But that did mean tearing every last shred of his magic from him and scouring every nook and cranny clean of the last wisp of his original magic, which took an inordinate amount of power.

As she had amassed the magic, Chiyo had barricaded it tightly within the boy, waiting for the right moment to let the dam break and to let the magic flow freely through him. With the spirit of rebirth from the new moon boosting the stockpile of power and with the addition of Kakashi's and Iruka's, Chiyo might have had just enough power to accomplish it.

Tsunade listened to the description and justification calmly until the end and pressed her fingers to the spot just between her eyebrows as if to suppress a massive headache. Then she informed Chiyo that she knew of the disease, and had they just come to her in the first place, she could have healed it outright instead of having to deal with this mess.

Luckily for Chiyo, the magic could be returned or she would have faced jail time. As it was, she found herself forced into a job at Tsunade's right hand where every action could be monitored and corrected if need be. Although the road to hell might be paved with them, having good intentions did make a difference.

Iruka crossed his arms and shifted away from the mirror. "She's lucky. It's not the right thing to do, but she could have had a lot worse reasons for it."

Kakashi made an assenting noise in the back of his throat.

"It's amazing how many of us there are out there who don't know that there's a support network they can rely on. Either of us would have gone to Tsunade," Iruka chuckled. "We did go to Tsunade. But it must be hard, trying to handle these things on her own." After a long moment of silence, he turned and raised an eyebrow at Kakashi.

"Very subtle."

"Thank you. I was doing my best." He strode away from the mirror and towards the door leading outside, checking once to see if Kakashi had followed him and then saying quietly. "I know it's not how you wanted me to find out. I don't think you ever wanted me to find out, but I know now, and it hasn't made me look at you any differently. So don't," Iruka waved a hand expressively, "Sulk out on my doorstep in the rain. You're going to get the cops called, and I'm going to have to listen to you complain when you get pneumonia. Come in and let me help. My door is always open, and I don't want you to push me away."

It was significantly more than he'd intended to say, but he was glad the words were out there once he'd finished. He had a sneaking suspicion that, given the slightest bit of wiggle room, Kakashi would misinterpret what he said and would convince himself that Iruka really didn't want to help him. He met Kakashi's gaze fully, just to reinforce it, and said, "I mean it."

Behind the mask, Kakashi opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again, emotions stampeding across the exposed half of his face. For a moment, he looked as though he was going to blurt something out, and then he dove across the intervening space, caught Iruka's face between his hands, and pressed a desperate kiss to his lips. One hand dropped to loop under Iruka's arm, tearing cloth away from Kakashi's face as it went, and settled in between Iruka's shoulder blades, pulling him inexorably closer.

"You...you..." Iruka flailed verbally when they broke apart before simply discarding the sentence and trying something new. "In those dreams, I was feeling everything you were. You'd think I would have noticed something like that."

"It's a bit of a recent development."

"How recent?" He didn't think that Kakashi was one to confuse gratitude with attraction, but who knew what kind of euphoria getting his magic back could induce.

"Possibly when I rescued you from your shower and saw such a lovely view of your..."

"Fishes." Iruka interrupted and then clicked his tongue in disappointment. "Guess it doesn't work anymore."

"Somehow, that's more annoying." Kakashi tapped a long finger on his chin and looked Iruka up and down. "I guess there's no accounting for taste."

"Excuse me, you are lucky to have me."

"I know." The serious words hung in the air between them, driving heat up Iruka's cheeks. Then Kakashi's eyes flashed wickedly; he leaned in and whispered against the cusp of Iruka's ear. "I've seen you naked."

Iruka glowered at Kakashi's retreating back, already conjuring up ideas for how to even the playing field on that count. He'd been inside Kakashi's mind for the last week after all, and he was fairly certain Kakashi wouldn't mind.

FIN

* * *

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!


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